service status check

[spurs]

I saw many questions asking to check status of specific service (if it's running or not)

in the playbook, are these same?

command: systemctl status postfix

command: /usr/bin/systemctl is-active postfix

the 2nd one is bit confusing. I don't know what exactly is-active does and if i can omit /usr/bin, so just make like

systemctl is-active postfix

Thanks!

[Fran_Garcia · Accepted solution]

You can always check the man page for systemctl : 

is-active PATTERN...
Check whether any of the specified units are active (i.e. running). Returns an exit code 0 if at least one is active, or non-zero otherwise. Unless --quiet is specified, this will also print the current unit state to standard output.

Using the full path to the command is a best practise to avoid issues invoking the wrong command if the system has a munged shell, wrong environment variables (eg: PATH), etc.